Mourning Lincoln (37 page)

AS MAY DREW TO A
close, it was time for a public display of Union glory. On Tuesday and Wednesday, May 23 and 24, three weeks after Lincoln’s burial in Illinois, visitors again poured into the capital, filling hotels and sleeping in horsecars, this time to watch soldiers march in the Grand Review in celebration of their victorious armies. The event’s very name implied the process of looking back in appraisal, but the idea of a review, especially a grand one, also signaled a shining future. Despite the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and however undefined that future remained, the capital would witness a magnificent performance.
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The weather was splendid. On a viewing stand in front of the White
House stood President Andrew Johnson, surrounded by cabinet members and military men. With a long view from the Capitol dome, Commissioner of Public Buildings Benjamin Brown French could see “troops by the thousands in every direction,” with Pennsylvania and Maryland Avenues entirely filled. Up close, it was imposing in a different way. From any one spot, it might take six hours for all the troops to pass by. Walt Whitman described it to his mother as soldiers “just marching steady all day long for two days, without intermission, one regiment after another, real warworn
soldiers
, that have been marching & fighting for years,” including “great battalions of blacks, with axes & shovels & pick axes.” The black men Whitman saw were not soldiers but laborers. The regiments of the U.S. Colored Troops were encamped too far from Washington to return for the affair, but former slaves in the capital joined the march spontaneously, and on the first day, the band played “John Brown’s Body.” Observers both black and white also noticed the tattered regimental flags, their broken staffs and ragged fringes testifying to bravery on the battlefield.
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Again came the sense of participation in history. Commissioner French felt sure that future generations would never see such a sight. Navy mathematician Simon Newcomb thought it the “greatest military display of the Western Hemisphere,” and the minister James Ward believed it the greatest show “on this continent, if not in the world.” Spectators choked up at the thought of the men returning home and choked up again at the thought of those who would never come back from the war. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles found it a “magnificent and imposing spectacle,” yet couldn’t help thinking of Abraham Lincoln’s absence—indeed, “All felt this,” he wrote in his diary. As a Maine volunteer told his sweetheart, the only note of sadness came in the wish that the beloved Lincoln “should have lived to see this.” Or as one onlooker recorded, “It was a strange feeling to be so intensely happy and triumphant, and yet to feel like crying.”
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The marchers were General George Meade’s men from the eastern Army of the Potomac (on Tuesday) and General Sherman’s men from the western Army of the Tennessee and Army of Georgia (on Wednesday). Some among the troops marveled too. As officer Stephen Weld of the Fifty-Sixth Massachusetts passed the Capitol, he sensed the Statue of Freedom atop the dome “looking down on us with triumph.” Others had a rougher time. The Thirty-Sixth Wisconsin marched twenty miles to Washington and
back in one day, which Guy Taylor thought was a “perlite way to kill” the soldiers left in the Union army. Speaking of going home, that’s all the men wanted to do, rather than being led around like “wild beasts for a mear show.” He was not, Taylor assured his wife, alone in his sentiments, for it was the “talk ov evry soldier that I have talked to.” Rufus Mead, a Connecticut volunteer whose regiment wasn’t taking part, went over to Pennsylvania Avenue to catch a glimpse but didn’t stay long. “We are tired & sick of Reviews already & never wish to see another as long as we live,” he confided to his diary.
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Confederates expressed discontent with the Grand Review for entirely different reasons. “What do you think I want to see all them devilish yankees for,” a Virginia man snapped to his wife when she asked if he would attend. “I can see more than I want to see at home!” Magnificent it may have been, but plenty of the defeated had no intention of joining the patriotism on display, either then or any time soon—or ever. The nation that emerged victorious in the war was not their own, and justice for the vanquished seemed unlikely unless they could find a way to bring the past with them into the future. Meanwhile, even for those who shared in the glory of victory, the future remained unsettled and uncertain, and for African Americans and their more radical white allies, the fruits of that victory were already beginning to seem elusive.
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Relics

AS THE VICTORS-TURNED-MOURNERS FORGED AHEAD
, they also looked back, collecting Lincoln memorabilia from the first instant. By gathering and preserving relics, the bereaved sought confirmation of the cataclysmic event, wrote themselves into the history they had witnessed, and enshrined the past for the future.

Images of the president were the most ubiquitous commodity, ranging from twenty-cent postcards sold on the street to medals and photographic portraits sold in shops to custom-ordered engravings. Lincoln was pictured alongside the First Lady, his son Tad, Andrew Johnson, and George Washington. Perhaps surprisingly, images of the assassin also went on sale, and while Confederates collected Booth memorabilia to honor their hero, mourners snapped them up too, as part of the preservation of history. To the same end, they collected copies of Lincoln’s speeches, early biographies of the president, funeral sermons, and memorial books that gathered together the Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address, and the second inaugural. A
Memorial Record of the Nation’s Tribute to Abraham Lincoln
, published in 1865, included both of his inaugural addresses, accounts of his “last day on earth” and the “dying scene,” transcriptions of
sermons and prayers delivered at services along the route of the funeral train, and national and international tributes.
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Anna Lowell, who wrote privately about the assassination a good deal longer than most, continued to collect mementos far past the first rush. Among these were multiple copies of a memorial booklet that she planned to give away as presents—but first she read the compendium from cover to cover, filled with “renewed veneration & admiration & love.” Only in late June did Lowell finally dispose of the mourning drapery with which she had decorated her home, offering it to a poorer neighbor in need of fabric.
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Scrapbook-making had become an ever more popular activity during the Civil War, and tributes to the slain chief often served as the final chapter of Union volumes. Whether the handiwork of African Americans in the South or white farmers or well-to-do women in the North, these were often little more than collections of newspaper clippings. A few compilers put in greater effort, like the New Yorker who walked miles along the city’s thoroughfares in the days after the assassination, drawing pictures of the banners he saw, thereby preserving sentiments about loss, vengeance, and forgiveness. Candace Carrington of Providence, Rhode Island, also devoted a good deal of time to creating a personal memorial. On April 15, she commenced a scrapbook devoted solely to the assassination, snipping and pasting articles from national and local papers that included coverage of the crime, mourning rituals, and the funeral, along with related poems, drawings, and musical compositions. Within two weeks, she began a second volume, this one home to a fifty-page section entitled “Round the World,” with coverage from Canada, South America, Europe, Russia, and Africa. (Carrington would give the set, in elegant red bindings, to her son on his nineteenth birthday, in 1871.)
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Artifacts also felt precious, and collection began on the night of April 14, at Ford’s Theatre. A government clerk who encountered the crowds on Tenth Street made his way into the playhouse while everyone else was exiting, climbed up to the presidential box, and pocketed Lincoln’s discarded bloody collar. A War Department employee who accompanied the president’s body across the street to Petersen House swiped a blood-soaked towel. The theater itself, closed in the immediate aftermath, became something of a pilgrimage site. Marian Hooper and Annette Rogers, in town from New England for the Grand Review, made their way around back to
study the spot where Booth had mounted his horse to escape, and struck up a conversation with a resident of the alley, a black woman who told them she had seen the assassin arrive and depart on the night of the crime. When Catherine Lansing traveled from Albany for the Grand Review, she also toured the White House and the Capitol, attended part of the conspirators’ trial, and stopped to look at Ford’s from the outside, a “very
very
crestfallen experience,” she wrote. James Moore, a white doctor whose black regiment had marched at the head of Lincoln’s funeral procession in Washington, tucked into an envelope a scrap of the crape tied to his sword and made his way to the theater and Petersen House, places that he knew would become—indeed had already become—historic.
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Petersen’s was open for business, and Marian Hooper went there too, peering into the tiny room where Lincoln had died, taking in the sight of the blood-soaked pillow, more than six weeks later “left just as it was on that night,” she wrote to a friend. Heartbreaking as it felt, there were two reasons she wanted to survey the frozen scene. First, it was “an historical fact.” Second, it made everything—that even now still seemed unbelievable—”so vivid.”
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10
Justice

THE WORD
REBELLION
IN PRESIDENT
Andrew Johnson’s amnesty proclamation rankled Rodney Dorman. Whether or not the new president pardoned Confederates, he was now “surpassing the demons of Hell in wickedness” just by saying that white southerners had ever been
in rebellion
. As a lawyer, Dorman firmly believed that the Confederacy had acted constitutionally, since “the people alone,” he wrote in his diary, “have a right to revolutionize & change their government.” In Dorman’s reading, it was the Yankees who were the rebels and who deserved death for their traitorous violations of the nation’s principles. “A thousand hangings” for every Union official couldn’t vindicate all their crimes, and yet, he spluttered, they pronounced Confederates guilty of treason. With each stroke of Dorman’s pen,
Lincon
, the unfortunately recovering William Seward, Andrew Johnson, the Freedmen’s Bureau agents, the freedpeople, and of course the abolitionists became “damned fools & asses,” “sharks & harpies,” “ninny-hammers,” “blaspheming, hypocritical priests,” “craven hearted knaves,” and “contemptible pukes & cowards.” When Dorman compared the U.S. marshal in Jacksonville to a dog, he apologized to dogs.
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As for Confederates swearing loyalty to the United States, that was nothing but “flummery” and “trash.” In mid-May, Union general B. C. Tilghman
had come to Jacksonville to announce that Confederates who wished to conduct business would have to take the oath of allegiance, and now Dorman despaired as he observed his compatriots obeying, even if it was only out of fear of starvation or a way to get back their confiscated property. On that note, the fact that the return of property didn’t include slaves struck Dorman as one of the greatest injustices of all. Jacksonville was crowded with African Americans that spring and summer, many of them refugees who had made their way to the city, and in Dorman’s view, the U.S. government had stolen them from their masters. The way he saw it, Yankees had forced enslaved men into the Union army in the first place, and now the agents of the federal Freedmen’s Bureau, along with the northern missionaries and “other theives,” were acting as fanatical “inciters of insurrection,” making submissive black people into copies of their horrific Yankee selves. Education was a major culprit, as the northerners made ignorant black people “still more ignorant,” more “insolent, wicked & depraved,” just like themselves. “What worse than the fiends of Hell, these Yankees, & their governments,” Dorman wrote with anguish, remaining silent about the white-on-black violence taking place in the city around him.
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Still intensely galling to Dorman were the occupying black men in uniform, now the “worst, most criminal” of all. William Johnson, with the Third U.S. Colored Troops, felt “great changes” in the making, he wrote from Jacksonville in June, even as he saw the local Confederates “die very hard at the idea of having black troops to guard them.” Accordingly, Dorman raged into his diary over those
great changes
. General Tilghman had announced that Jacksonville’s black population could go to work for their former masters for wages—a clear recipe for failure, Dorman believed, since the natural inclination of black people was to “enjoy themselves without labor or care.” In freedom, as opposed to slavery, they would have to “labor harder & get less,” he reckoned, and would only find “less comfort & enjoyment.” When Dorman wrote fervently of his wish to end “tyranny & oppression of all kinds,” he remained resolutely blind to any dimension of injustice in the southern institution of racial slavery.
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